Ever since ChatGPT was released to the public last November, I’ve been eager to write a blog about it. However, the daunting prospect of facing a blank screen kept me from starting the task, and I found myself procrastinating. Today, I finally summoned the courage to begin writing, but with a few tweaks from my usual approach.
Allow me to describe the meta experiment to understand how I can utilize ChatGPT to help me write the blog.
First, I followed my usual process by creating an outline of what I wanted to cover in the blog post. The outline contains a bullet list of the key points, section headings, brief summary of each section, the references and conclusion.
Then I wrote the post on my own, based on the outline, and my usual tools Obsidian and VS Code. This was a lengthy process of finding and reading relevant articles and videos I had saved in Pocket, and summarizing the key takeaways in my own words. I previewed the post and polished it to my satisfaction and published it at ChatGPT - An Introduction.
Now the fun begins. I asked ChatGPT to write the post based on the outline I provided - I put in the outline in the ChatGPT text box and gave the prompt ‘write a blog post using this outline < my outline >’. ChatGPT’s response was fairly ok, with a lot of fluff and filler words, but it was quite impressive. I was fascinated by how much content it was able to generate based on the outline.
The fun continues. I gave my whole post to ChatGPT and gave the prompt to improve the full content. It wasn’t able to do it in one go (most likely due to the limitations of my free version), so I gave it section by section. ChatGPT generated a pretty improvised version of my blog, this time, with fewer filler words because the content was rich.
So here are the three versions:
- ChatGPT Intro - original version written by Ann
- ChatGPT Intro - written by ChatGPT using Ann’s outline
- ChatGPT Intro - rewritten by ChatGPT from Ann’s originial post
This exercise showcases the real power of ChatGPT, which has been a motivation for me to write this post. It is a fantastic tool that lowered the barrier for to write and worked along with me like an assistant. As I wrote in my original post, all of us should use ChatGPT to improve our productivity and creativity. It still requires our orginal thinking, but it can make us better writers, artists and programmers. Generative AI is here to stay and so are we!
Ok, now the million dollar question - did I use ChatGPT for this post itself? Oh yes!
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